CLARUS approach to standardisation

Standardisation is of major interest for CLARUS so that protocols and functions can be made homogeneous for cloud providers and CLARUS proxies. These aspects are rather important in the multi-proxy architecture design in other to ensure that interoperability can be achieved among otherwise heterogeneous cloud providers and organisations.

Security and privacy

Several standards have been analysed to address aspects related to security, privacy, and cloud computing.
In the context of identity management CLARUS looks at standards implementing Federated Identities (IDs) and Single sign-on (SSO).
Federated identities (IDs) allow users to use credentials and IDs already set with a trusted identity provider to access cloud services. Thus, a federation identity consists of linking IDs of trusted providers. The IDs could be held directly by the client or by the trusted ID provider.
Single sign-on (SSO) enables a federation of identities. Users can access multiple services without being prompted for additional authentication. SSO requires trust relationships between service providers as the authentication token, issued by a provider, need to be trusted across multiple systems and domains.

Application domains

CLARUS use cases require the analysis of the domain related standards: the Open Geospatial Consortium standards for the publication ofgeo-referenced data on the Internet, and the Health Level-7 standard for the transfer and format of healthcare information.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a worldwide consensus of organisations collaborating on the development and implementation of open standards for geospatial content and services. The Open Geospatial Consortium notably developed standards enabling interoperability for the publication of geospatial data on the Internet. Besides interoperability matters, standardization is also important for the storage of geospatial data (either in spatial databases or in GIS files).
Health Level Seven International (HL7) defines a set of international standards for the exchange, integration, sharing and retrieval of clinical and administrative health information between information systems used by various healthcare providers.